WordPress Monthly Maintenance Care Plans

Why you need a Maintenance Plan

WordPress is the most popular content management system (CMS) in use today. It's a great choice for many kinds of websites but it needs ongoing updates and maintenance to stay in top shape.

Due to this popularity, it's also the #1 CMS most attacked by hackers and malware. Extra measures need to be taken to keep your website secure and to quickly recover from an attack.

Updating WordPress is more than just pressing buttons or turning settings on. Most WordPress websites are made up of many 3rd party plugins and theme (design) customizations. This can make updating your site tricky, as updates can break compatibility between all the various components.

You’ve invested a great deal of time and money into your WordPress website, and we understand how important it is to you. Maybe your site is your primary marketing tool or maybe it’s the entire engine behind your business. With so much riding on your site, are you protected so that if the worst happens you can be back online with minimal downtime? One of the most common malware or virus attacks are called "defacing", the attacker replaces your home page with their own images and this can be quite embarrassing if not caught and fixed quickly - we can be your disaster recovery plan!

We know how to keep your website healthy and safe by keeping malware at bay, dealing with plugin conflicts, performing core updates, maintaining backup archives, managing proxy firewalls and CDNs, and more. And, if disaster strikes, we know what to do to get your site back online before your business suffers.

How we help you

  • We save you time: Most business owners don't have the knowledge or time to deal with maintaining and monitoring their website, scanning for malware, dealing with plugin conflicts, or handling system restores if things go bad. We do!
  • We keep your website secure: We know how to keep your website healthy and safe with continuous malware scans, file monitoring, protecting the login page, maintaining backup archives, implementing HTTPS, and more.
  • We can fix it: If disaster strikes, we know what to do to get you back online before your business suffers. On Silver and Gold plans, our uptime monitor alerts us the moment the site goes down, and we monitor files that have changed.
  • We can make your website even better: As part of our maintenance care plans, we make recommendations on how your website can be improved. These improvements are centered on design, security, hosting quality, performance, usability, and more. Don't let your site stagnate!
  • We are available for more: Not only do we provide monthly care of your website, but we are a full service web development shop. Any time you want to make changes, improve the site, migrate, upgrade, change themes, or build a new feature, we are right here to take on projects at a reasonable hourly rate. It's like having a web developer employee in your back pocket to use only when needed! If you want to implement any of our recommendations, just say so! And if needed, any extra time will be invoiced separately. Simple!

Every Plan Includes the Following:

  • Monthly updates to WordPress, plugins, and theme (depends on type of theme used).
  • Offsite backups.
  • Uptime monitoring and reporting.
  • Malware scanning and firewall (if configured).
  • Site hardening tactics and login protection.
  • Additional plugins added and configured.
  • A monthly report of tasks performed, recommendations, uptime performance, and more.
  • Recommendations to improve your website across multiple metrics.
  • Support time to fix issues and handle your requests (how much time depends on plan).
WordPress Logo

Bronze

$75/m
  • Daily offsite backups to Amazon S3 with 14 days retention.
  • Ongoing malware scanning with basic cleanup if needed.
  • Security hardening tactics performed on the site.
  • Uptime monitoring and reporting.
  • Site reviews and suggestions.
  • 1 hour of retainer time. *
  • Monthly report of work done, uptime, suggestions, more.

Silver

$120/m
  • Daily offsite backups to Amazon S3 with 31 days retention.
  • Ongoing malware scanning with cleanup if needed.
  • Security hardening tactics performed on the site.
  • Uptime monitoring and other alerts are sent directly to us for review.
  • Site reviews and suggestions.
  • File system monitoring for changed/added files review.
  • 1.5 hours of retainer time. *
  • Monthly report of work done, uptime, suggestions, more.
  • Optionally configure Google Analytics and Console accounts.
  • Scan for bad links and other content problems.

Gold

$230/m
  • Daily offsite backups to Amazon S3 with 42 days retention.
  • Ongoing malware scanning with cleanup included.
  • Security hardening tactics performed on the site.
  • Uptime alerts are given immediate attention. Direct contact with host support.
  • Site reviews and suggestions.
  • File system monitoring for changed/added files review.
  • 2 hours of retainer time. *
  • Monthly report of work done, uptime, suggestions, more.
  • Optionally configure Google Analytics and Console accounts.
  • Customized Google Analytics report emailed monthly directly to you.
  • Customized functionlity tests performed after updates and projects.
  • Customized selection of plugins set to auto-update. Any critical plugins are done manually.
  • Staging site used before any major updates and projects to reduce possiblility of downtime.
  • Scan for bad links and other content problems.

* The standard window of time for performing maintenance is anywhere from 10 to 45 minutes depending on how complex the website is and how much needs tested. If there is time leftover within the retainer period, it can be used for any approved tasks. Sometimes if we find a bug or problem, we will immediately work on it when retainer is available. If monthly work goes beyond the included retainer for that month, it will be tracked and billed once it reaches a half hour or more accumulated. If we frequently need to go over retainer, additional time can be purchased within your monthly plan.

There is an onboarding fee of $199 to integrate a new domain into a plan. It covers initial audits, cleanup, and installing and configuring our plugins.

Basic Plan ($50/month)

Sometimes all you really want is to make sure the site is updated and backed up. If the site is small, runs few plugins, and rarely has issues, and you would like basic maintenance, this is for you. Aimed at non-profits, small sites, and modern sites that don't need a lot of hand-holding and rarely have problems. The Basic Plan gets you 10 days of offsite nightly backups on top of whatever your hosting provides. You'll also be able to use our security plugin to harden the site and protect against brute force attacks. Updates are all automatic, and you'll have uptime monitoring as well. You can make use of our tech support and send in tickets for extra work or to report issues. You'll receive a basic report about updates that were done. Any extra tasks or projects beyond maintenance are billed separately. Please note this is not an actively managed site, we are not directly working with your host or receiving alerts, it is up to you to report issues if you notice them. There are $450/year worth of tools being used on these plans.

Addons To Boost Your Site:

These are for special situations, and optional, except for ecommerce which is highly recommended if you do have a store.

eCommerce Support

$30/month

For sites with ecommerce features. We ensure your website works great by providing additional services and testing of your store. We'll make sure eCommerce functions are continuing to work after maintenance is done, such as the shopping cart and checkout pages. We'll help make changes and configure your store, as well as include additional store-related recommendations.

High Priority

$60/month

For businesses that need support issues addressed quickly. Tickets and uptime issues are sent directly to developers for ASAP attention. We take additional care with monthly updates to make sure your site looks and functions great. With this addon, you can customize additional testing of any features you deem most important such as mega menus, sliders, dynamic content widgets, social media, web forms, animations, 3rd party integrations, and custom code. Your ticket submissions will automatically receive a high priority status.

Firewall Protection

$10/month

For businesses concerned about security. With this addon we will add your site to our proxy firewall service which allows all public web traffic to be scanned for malware and other attacks before it ever reaches your server. The service allows for mitigation of DDOS attacks and also includes malware cleaning, a CDN (for performance), cache features, and free SSL. This addon requires a change to your domain DNS records to point to the proxy. Firewall protection is highly recommended!

FAQ

  • What do I do if my website is down?

    We monitor uptime at 5 minute intervals. During business hours we'll get notified of the downtime and can verify it. If you have a high priority addon, we are notified directly of the downtime and can act on it immediately even outside our regular business hours.

    If you find the site is down and you have a Bronze or Basic plan and want to make sure we look at it, send an email to support to create a ticket and we'll follow up.

    Unless you have a very powerful hosting company, some amount of downtime per month is expected, you will see this on your monthly reports. Often, downtime doesn't last more than a few minutes anyway before the site comes back up.

    Finally, to handle downtime, we usually must contact your hosting company. A good host will have 24/7 support with quick access to tech support. If there is no access to tech support, there is very little in our control to bring the site back up and we must wait it out. The best option is to make sure you use a quality hosting company and that we have access to the account in order to contact support when needed!

  • How do I request support?

    Simply email support@wallaceitsolutions.com and a ticket will be generated for the account associated with your email.

    You can also fill out a support form here.

    You are free to use tickets for anything from support requests to asking questions. Tickets are answered during business hours. With the high priority addon, we'll look at the tickets outside of normal hours as well.

    We can also arrange to have phone calls, video conferences, and screen sharing sessions if needed.

  • Do I really need an eCommerce Addon?

    If your site includes a store, this addon is highly recommended. The last thing you want is to find out that customers have not been able to check out for weeks! This addon provides extra time to test the store functionality. We make sure the cart functions, checkout page works, orders are coming through, emails are going out. There are many things that can go wrong with a shopping cart after system updates. A theme problem could arise causing script errors, a plugin becomes incompatible with another plugin, etc.

    Short of requiring this addon for all eCommerce sites, we do allow eCommerce sites not to buy it, but you will have to keep a close eye on your own store and submit a ticket if you find any problems. This is also easier if you have a way for your customers to contact you to report problems directly.

    What we don't want to see is a shopping cart that nobody is keeping an eye on, and customers who can't report issues!

  • What if I need more support time than what the plan includes?

    When we notice a very obvious issue during our maintenance work, the support time is used to get it fixed up right away. The problem will be detailed in your monthly report, and you won't have to worry about anything!

    If there is a problem which is considered "major" and your retainer time doesn't cover it, we'll generate a ticket for you to detail the issue and have additional time approved first before we work on it at our normal rate.

    If, over time, we find that your site needs regular "extra" work, you are free to buy additional monthly retainer time and have it automatically added to your bill.

  • What if I want to improve my graphic design?

    You can consider us a full service shop! Just let us know what you want done and we'll bid you a price on it. For large projects, we'll add you to a project management tool to keep track of progress and tasks over time. We can bill by the hour or put together a flat price on the project.

    Everything we do is just a support ticket away and we can work together from there! The recommendations we give can be very little things all the way up to very big things, entire site redesigns if we feel it will benefit you in the long run.

    We're not only here to work for you, but also to answer questions, so feel free to ask about projects and talk about your site as much as you want! Consider this a built-in consulting service!

  • What kind of additional testing is included in the High Priority addon?

    Our definition of "high priority" is that you want problems detected as soon as possible, fixes implemented as soon as possible, and priority attention given as much as possible. It means your website is critical to your business.

    In order to acheive this, we spend extra time on feature testing and usability. High priority means testing the site for form and function across all its many features and pages. This is a customized service, it's based on how your site is built and what features are critical to its operation.

    As an example, if your site uses 15 plugins, these are meant to do something important, we test their function where used on the site. If you have a plugin for showing Youtube video popups, we record which pages you use that on, and make sure they are still working after updates. If you have Google Maps, we visit your contact page to make sure the maps are working. You can define specific functions you'd like tested regularly, such as contact forms or 3rd party connections.

    The uptime montitor and ticketing system will alert us any time, even during non-business hours.